1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computers and computer networks. More particularly, the invention relates to using domain name service (DNS) tagging to identify content and services associated with the traffic flows.
2. Background of the Related Art
The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as the Web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, one can view Web contents, which are Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia. In addition, the Web pages can be navigated via hyperlinks using the Web browser.
In recent years, the Internet has witnessed the explosion of cloud-based services and video streaming applications. In both cases, content delivery networks (CDN) and/or cloud computing services are used to meet the scalability and availability requirements. An undesirable side-effect of this is that it decouples the owner of the content and the organization (e.g., CDN, cloud computing services) serving it. For example, videos of CNN® (a registered trademark of Cable News Network, Inc., Atlanta, Ga.) or YouTube® (a registered trademark of Google Inc., Mountain View, Calif.) as content owners can be served by Akamai® (a registered trademark of Akamai Technologies, Inc., Cambridge, Mass.) as a CDN or Google® (a registered trademark of Google Inc., Mountain View, Calif.) as a CDN. In another example, the Farmville® (a registered trademark of Zynga Inc., San Francisco, Calif.) game accessible from the Facebook® (a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.) (i.e., content owner) social network may be actually running on Amazon EC2® (a registered trademark of Amazon Technologies, Inc., Reno, Nev.) cloud computing platform. This may be even more complicated since various CDNs and content owners implement their own optimization mechanisms to ensure “spatial” and “temporal.” diversity for load distribution. For instance, CNN uses Akamai® and Level3® (a registered trademark of Level 3 Communications, LLC, Broomfield Colo.) as CDNs for certain customers during daytime, while it only uses Level3® for the same customers at night. In addition, several popular sites like Twitter® (a registered trademark of Twitter, Inc., San Francisco, Calif.), Facebook®, and Google® have started adopting encryption (TLS/HTTPS) to deliver content to their users. This trend is expected to gain more momentum in the next few years. While this helps to protect end-users' privacy, it can be a big impediment to effective security operations. The above factors have resulted in “tangled” World Wide Web which is hard to understand, discern, and control.